He announced on 5 December that he was ditching a proposal that he had been working on to jump-start negotiations on a community patent, because EU industry and economics ministers refused to sign up to a new fast-track patent dispute settlement procedure. The trigger was ministers’ rejection of an attempt to sign up to the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA), which would have created a single European patent court and common rules for disputes in national courts. After France and some other member states said they could not accept the move, McCreevy concluded that it was not worth trying to make progress on the community patent and he dumped a proposal which was scheduled to be adopted on 12 December.

“I thought what we were proposing here would not be that difficult for member states to accept but anything of significance is becoming increasingly difficult to make progress on,” he told European newspapers.

“Anything remotely concerning this patent area is fraught with minefields at every turn of the road,” he added.

His decision will come as a major blow to European businesses and in particular to attempts to boost the EU’s competitiveness by making it easier for inventors to get patent protection to bring their inventions to market.

The myriad of different national patent approvals systems and the translation requirements for applications mean that the cost of obtaining a patent in the EU is much more than in the US or Japan. The cost of translation alone (into two additional languages as well as the language in which the application is filed) is estimated to account for 38% of the total. The Commission says that litigation costs in the UK can be as much as €1.5 million in the first instance and a further €1m for subsequent appeals. If the EPLA approach had been approved it would have cost €415,000 for the first case and only €220,000 for the second.

German centre-right MEP Klaus-Heiner Lehne who has worked on many intellectual property issues including the infamous software patents directive, accused McCreevy of “abandoning the strengthening of European competitiveness” by dropping the proposal on a community patent.

But McCreevy is only responding to the political reality. EU governments tried and failed to get a deal on the patent in 2003 with Spain and Germany refusing to agree to a streamlined language regime which would have cost their national patent approval offices revenue from applications.

McCreevy’s officials say he will look again towards the end of the German presidency in the first half of 2007 to see if there is more appetite for getting a deal. But in the meantime Europe’s innovators will have to wade their way through diverse and divergent national systems.